Overview

Winner of The 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss Fenestration excavates public and private history. The poems here bristle with striking clarity and immediacy while compellingly confronting subjects such as the transatlantic slave trade, familial memory, HIV, environmental perils, and more. What happened inside those slave forts in Ghana, Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Africans were immured for weeks, sometimes months, before facing the horror of the Middle Passage? How does one carry the memory of his dead father? Fenestration, among other things, throbbing with an unflinching consciousness that splices history and memory, unfolds powerfully.

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9781680034448

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Reviews

""Othuke Umukoro's Fenestration is keenly aware of the violent implications of its title, but its sense of language and metaphor as repositories of historical complexity are broader than that. Fenestration carefully builds, arranges and peers through an array of portals: childhood memory of abundance and loss, collective memory of suffering and resilience, the dailiness of social life as a diasporic writer wrestling with poetic inheritance and possibility. Stitching his own transatlantic crossings--physical and psychic--through a harrowing imagination of the Middle Passage, Umukoro blends lush lyricism with observational directness, gazing with steady eyes at the world of fact and sensation and at the 'coffined dark' within. Umukoro's is a bracing, painful and ultimately affirming vision: 'Whichever way I look, I am what is bent.'"" --Mark Levine, author of Sound Fury --Mark Levine ""Othuke's heart-centric new work, Fenestration, is filled with tender poems of discovery. They stay with the reader long after the end of a page, and the book. The strength of these poems is in the refined delicacy of understanding, through dilated pupils, the bayonets' knife's edge. Both through the intimacy of complex love between father and son, and the sweeping and intimate pain of those Africans whose involuntarily journeys created the African diaspora we know today, we comprehend what it means to perceive the world through haunted, multi-century somatic knowing."" --Tracie Morris, author of human/nature poems --Tracie Morris

“Othuke Umukoro’s Fenestration is keenly aware of the violent implications of its title, but its sense of language and metaphor as repositories of historical complexity are broader than that. Fenestration carefully builds, arranges and peers through an array of portals: childhood memory of abundance and loss, collective memory of suffering and resilience, the dailiness of social life as a diasporic writer wrestling with poetic inheritance and possibility. Stitching his own transatlantic crossings—physical and psychic—through a harrowing imagination of the Middle Passage, Umukoro blends lush lyricism with observational directness, gazing with steady eyes at the world of fact and sensation and at the ‘coffined dark’ within. Umukoro’s is a bracing, painful and ultimately affirming vision: ‘Whichever way I look, I am what is bent.’” - Mark Levine, author of Sound Fury   “Othuke’s heart-centric new work, Fenestration, is filled with tender poems of discovery. They stay with the reader long after the end of a page, and the book. The strength of these poems is in the refined delicacy of understanding, through dilated pupils, the bayonets’ knife’s edge. Both through the intimacy of complex love between father and son, and the sweeping and intimate pain of those Africans whose involuntarily journeys created the African diaspora we know today, we comprehend what it means to perceive the world through haunted, multi-century somatic knowing.” - Tracie Morris, author of human/nature poems

Author Information

Othuke Umukoro, Nigerian poet and playwright, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he won the Academy of American Poets University Poetry Prize. Winner of the prestigious Brunel International African Poetry Prize, his work appears in Ploughshares, POETRY, The Hudson Review, The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere.

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